Indeed. But it is easy to forget that both these protocols were devised at a time when 4Mb/s was fast and 300 baud quite normal. In those circumstances, last time outs measured in minutes probably made sense.

The problem isn't that there was anything specifically wrong with the original formulations of those defaults. More that they have never been brought into line with modern hardware as time has gone on. They are only defaults, but that does means that they tend to get used by default.

Maybe IPv6 has corrected some of these archaic leftovers?

Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error.

"Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority".

In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice.

That would be a logical assumption, which would make it highly unlikely :). IPv6 changes nothing about TCP. Well OK, it changes how the pseudoheader checksum is calculated (part of TCP header). From an OSI-model point of view, they really had little choice about changing TCP, as this is at a different layer, and each layer is supposed to be independent of the others. I worked on our IPv6 implementation, and the pseudoheader was the only TCP code that we had to touch. They even pretty much left the 1500-byte MTU alone, mostly because of legacy devices.